LOUISE PLACHTA: Fun with the English language

Ah petrichor! Don’t you just love it? You love “it,” if you enjoy the scent of the outdoors after rain has fallen, especially after a prolonged a dry spell.

If winter proves to be long and cold, and we find that we are spending more and more time indoors, some of us may become bibliobibuli. Librarians will undoubtedly welcome us warmly because bibliobibuli are people who read too much. (Can one ever read too much?)

Not all of us are into “pogonotrophy,” thank goodness. Be careful that you read the term correctly because all it means is that three of my Grands and many of their friends are pogonotrophic. Definition: They grow and groom facial hair – their beards.

I came across these terms and a few more like them in a short article entitled “There’s a (weird) word for that,” in a recent issue of Reader’s Digest (October, 2013, p. 107). Those can’t be real, acceptable nouns, can they? Doubting Thomasina that I am, I was determined to find out. According to dictionaries and books about word origins that are readily at hand, at home, no such words existed.

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Stymied, and reluctant though I am to engage technology in my searches, I clicked on Google and found that the words are, indeed, legitimate words. The English Oxford Dictionary gave me the word origins, definitions, and examples of their usage in sentences – an edifying feature.

If you enjoy the scent of the outside after it rains, then you enjoy “petrichor.” If you are of the persuasion of the second term noted above, “bibliobibulis,” you read too much. And if you engage in “pogonotrophy,” you have a beard.

After the next welcome rainfall, I may not exclaim “Ahh petrichor!” but it would be fun to stun someone with the word.

Unfortunately, I am not a bibliobilus (bibliobila?); although I read quite a bit, I do not read as much I would like to.

And I hope that I never become pogonotrophic! If I did, however, I guess I could always join the circus.

Speaking and/or writing of words: Someone of prominence used the phrase “has went” in a speech that he gave in the mid-Michigan area. (Awkkk! Imagine fingernails scraping across an old-fashioned blackboard.)

A Morning Sun reader was so incensed with the misuse of the English language that s/he was prompted to call Sound Off! to chastise the speaker.

Soon after the complaint appeared in the paper, a reader asked my opinion about the use of “has went” as a substitute for “has gone.” I told him that I am not an expert in the English language, but from my knowledge of grammar, I was quite certain that the “has went” was incorrect.

The fellow then told me that he had consulted a teacher who told him that saying “someone has went” is correct because the verb that was used was in the past pluperfect tense.

“When in doubt, check it out,” my best friend was wont to say. So I went online, searched various sites and found nothing to indicate verbs in the “past pluperfect” tense.

Still not satisfied, I contacted a real expert on the English language, one of my former professors of English, Dr. Clara Lee Moodie. She responded that “someone has went” is not grammatically correct and that there is not a past pluperfect tense for the verb “go.” Pluperfect? Yes. Past pluperfect? No.

For instance, if a colleague is absent from the office because of a speaking engagement, we would tell a caller that our officemate “has gone” (not “has went”) to make a presentation or to give a speech at the (fill in the organization’s name).

With these thoughts in mind, I suggest that we promise to make a good-English day for those with whom we meet and talk, to speak properly and well.